The global decades of the twentieth century marked new territories in gendered geographies. New and increased transnational networks dramatically changed discourses about women’s bodies, gendered spaces, and labor during the global decades of the twentieth century. By focusing on precisely that time period this panel will further discussions about marginal women’s labor across North Africa and the broader Middle East. The panel’s periodization allows, in particular, for an analysis of the heightened policing of women’s labor, movement, and urban boundaries during the interwar years and beyond.
The panel begins with a discussion of gendered enslavement and enslaving in early twentieth century Iran. As most slaves in Iran were East African women, sexually vulnerable to their masters, the last decades of legal slavery and abolition ushered in a period of restructuring gender roles and family relationships to redefine gender, status, and prestige in Iran. By drawing upon newspapers, family photographs, and memoirs, this panelist demonstrates how abolition affected appropriate notions of gender, family, and Iranian identity. Moving westward to interwar Algeria, the next panelist considers how press commentators compared the new class of mobile working women, mostly made up of domestic servants, to prostitutes. These male commentators’ efforts to stigmatize women’s labor reflected their own economic anxieties in the global economic downturn of the Great Depression. Following this analysis of controversial women’s work, the next panelist examines tensions around Muslim women domestic servants in Jewish homes in Morocco. The panelist is particularly attentive to the colonial state’s efforts to police the boundaries crossed by these women. Continuing the discussion of states versus women actors, the next panelist examines French vocational schools for girls during the Algerian War, using a broad range of sources including those from the French Army’s Bureau for Psychological Warfare. The final paper interrogates academic and popular assertions that Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front vehemently opposed women’s engagement in public and political life in the country. It draws upon contemporary international and local press coverage of the party along with oral history testimonies from former FIS partisans to highlight women’s political work in the party with the aim of historicizing women’s participation in Islamist movements more broadly across the region. While exploring different regional foci, this panel interrogates women’s labor to better understanding urban divisions and gender boundaries during the twentieth century.
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Beeta Baghoolizadeh
This presentation investigates how the gradual move towards abolition upended the gendered and racial contours of the domestic realm, particularly concerning the enslavement of sexually vulnerable East African women in early twentieth century Iran. Elite Iranian women often requested or received black female slaves as a part of their marriage dowry, establishing a gendered dynamic where the ownership of a slave woman established one’s full womanhood at the cost of another's. Through a textual, visual, a spatial analysis of mediated sources, this presentation explores the costs of gendered labor during this period.
The early twentieth century was the last period to see such exchanges of slaves within the domestic sphere, as legislated manumission of slaves in 1929 rendered slavery illegal within Iran. During this period, notions of normative gender roles fluctuated. Various members of society, including progressives, intellectuals, clerics, and elites debated how to build an ideal society free of slaves, while enslaved women continued to occupy marginally visible spaces in most elite homes. While scholars of gender in modern Iran have attributed the shifts away from polygamous to monogamous family structures to increased Westernization and contact with Europeans, this presentation argues that the diminishing presence of foreign enslaved women served as a critical factor.
In the final decades of legal slavery in Iran, debates around abolition involved significant challenges to normative gender roles. Most enslaved peoples were female domestics, often serving as nannies or cooks while also being sexually vulnerable to their masters. The womanhood of free, non-black women, depended upon their management of the household and their ability to relegate chores to enslaved women. The abolition of slavery, then, required a restructuring of gender roles within the home. Instead of aspirational femininity resting upon the ownership of slaves as status symbols, women as caretakers, proper housewives, and diligent mothers became the norm. This newly articulated form of womanhood effectively erased the roles of black women who had been forcibly enslaved from East Africa and brought to Iran via land or sea routes. Through an examination of women’s mothering guides, private family photographs, sale contracts, memoirs and residential spaces and their floor plans, this presentation explores the value of gendered labor and demonstrates the gradual marginalization of enslaved women.
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Dr. Sara Rahnama
This paper explains the interwar transformations in Algerian women’s labor and the anxiety and debate it provoked in the press. As increasing numbers of families moved from rural Algeria to Algeria’s largely European urban centers in the interwar period, women’s labor also shifted. Previously women’s labor was either agricultural or artisanal labor within the home, such as carpet weaving, lace making, or embroidery. In the interwar period, however, thousands of Algerian women in urban centers were newly employed as domestic servants in European homes. Women moved through the city in new ways, regularly traversing the boundaries between Algerian and European neighborhoods. This mobility transformed not only family dynamics, but also institutions of interwar Algerian public life. This increased mobility, visibility, and engagement provoked sex panic within both the French- and Arabic-language press. Every detail of women’s movement and comportment carried new meaning—including how her body moved through space, her choice of makeup, and whether she stopped to talk to shopkeepers or passersby. Men expressed their sexual anxiety by drawing allusions between the women they newly observed in public and public women, or prostitutes. Working women’s visibility and mobility, they argued, mirrored the sexual and moral indecency of prostitutes. Many questioned whether these developments signaled the beginning of the Algerian man’s demise, as he would be emasculated not only by women’s new earning power but by her potential sexual indecency. The intimate connections between women’s labor in the settler economy and these discourses of sexual danger reflected men’s economic anxiety in the face of women’s increased visibility, mobility, and earning power. This paper will draw from a range of archives, including the French- and Arabic-language Algerian press, state archives from Algeria, and print sources including interwar dissertations.
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Dr. Graham Cornwell
This paper examines the regulation of Moroccan women domestic servants in colonial Morocco from the mid-1930s to 1952. These dates encompass a nearly two-decade controversy about the freedom of Moroccan Muslim women to move and work in the colonial city. Both Muslim and Jewish women’s bodies were the site of colonial intervention, with French Protectorate authorities passing numerous decrees and municipal orders about where and how women could earn a living and reside. Muslim and Jewish women, however, were not monitored and regulated in the same ways, but rather regulations on their bodies were influenced by French and Moroccan Muslim elite views of urban space and the role of women within that space.
The idea of an archetypal “Islamic city” was a critical to early twentieth-century scholars of the urban Middle East and North Africa, but it neglected the presence and influence of religious minorities on the city’s physical and cultural landscape. In this paper, I analyze how the colonial state attempted to protect the concept of a pure “Islamic city” by attempting to keep Moroccan Muslim women from inhabiting and working in the mellah, or Jewish quarter, of Moroccan cities, where a growing number had taken up employment as domestic servants in Jewish households. I focus specifically on Marrakesh—home to the largest mellah in Morocco—but draw on examples from Casablanca, Meknes, and Mogador as well. In these cities, I ask why Muslim women were subject to tighter controls on their movement and employment than Jewish women were. How did Moroccan and French elites cooperate on these issues?
Using Protectorate documents, petitions from Moroccan notables, and colonial-era periodicals, I trace the debate over women’s work through a 1941 formal ban on Muslim women in Jewish homes to the 1952 abrogation of the original law. I show how restrictive measures coincided with broader intercommunal tensions in Morocco and elsewhere in the French empire, and how these were brought to bear on Muslim women’s livelihoods.
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Dr. Terrence Peterson
As they confronted a growing national revolution in Algeria in the late 1950s, French military leaders turned to a new tool to reestablish order: development. Framed around a broad program of social, economic, and political integration, the French Army’s counterinsurgency campaign sought to intervene heavily in Algerian society, not only to root out revolutionary elements, but to effect deep structural changes that could bind Algeria more durably to France.
Central to this campaign stood a set of vocational training programs for women and girls. For French policymakers, women’s labor, mobility, and consumption constituted key sites of intervention. These policymakers believed that by integrating Algerian women into the French consumer economy as workers and shoppers from an early age, they would be able to erase Algerian socioeconomic difference, loosen the imagined stranglehold of Muslim men over the family, and push Algeria rapidly down the path of economic modernization. From 1958 until independence in 1962, the French Army taught domestic and professional skills to rural women and girls in hundreds of informal workgroups and Youth Training Centers across Algeria with the aim of effecting such transformations.
But as this paper will argue, the women’s labor envisioned by these vocational programs was often far less emancipatory than it appeared. Colonial planners struggled to imagine economic roles for Algerian women beyond artisanal production like handweaving or embroidery, and often excluded girls from the types of professional training afforded to boys, favoring instead a focus on domestic and childrearing skills. This gendered division of labor, I argue, reflected the close link between gender order and social order in the minds of French officials, and betrayed the programs’ underlying aim to shore up French authority. Drawing on the archives of the French Army’s Psychological Warfare Bureau and the Algerian Youth Training Service, this paper aims to historicize and interrogate the persistently close links between women’s work and social control in counterinsurgency.
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In the period between Algeria’s Arab Spring-like October 1988 revolution and its gradual slide into a civil conflict starting in early 1992, the country experienced a brief but fleeting experiment with democracy that prompted dozens of political parties to form virtually overnight. Algerian joke-tellers, aficionados at mixing biting political critique with wit, quickly pounced on the opportunity to tease some of the new political organizations for their ideological stances. They particularly reveled in crafting puns on the nascent parties’ acronyms. Within this comedic framework, anonymous civilians joked that the Islamic Salvation Front or FIS’s common acronym actually stood for “femmes interdites de sortir,” French for “women forbidden from going out.” With this twist on the name of the country’s major Islamist party, anecdotists claimed that the FIS denied women the right to engage in public life.
The creative comic minds behind this joke were hardly alone in their assessment of the Islamist organization. Left-leaning newspapers such as "Alger Républicain" proliferated images of FIS activists as overwhelmingly male and the supposed singular ideology of party as antithetical to women’s rights. Even after the Algerian military intervened to prevent the FIS from taking control of the national parliament in January 1992, portrayals of FIS actors as exclusively male have persisted. For instance, scholars have explained the rise of the FIS as a product of predominately youthful male anger at a long-standing, corrupt regime.
Yet, assertions that the FIS wanted women out of the public sphere run counter to the reality that tens of thousands of Algerian women supported the FIS through a number of undertakings during the party’s short tenure as a licit organization. These activities included turning out in large numbers to vote for the party as well as publically marching and speaking in favor of the movement. This presentation will spotlight female participation in the wider FIS movement. Drawing upon contemporary press coverage of the party from 1989 to 1992 and oral history testimonies with former FIS partisans living abroad, it explores women FIS activists’ almost invisible public engagement at one of the most key points of shifting change in the country’s post-independence period. In doing so, this presentation aims to help historicize women’s involvement in political Islamist movements and parties throughout the region. In doing so, it will forward scholarship by writers like Monica Marks, Lila Abu-Lughod, and William Lawrence.
